The Hero of Hope Springs Page 12

  Or maybe it wasn’t a workingman’s hand. Maybe it was that it was Ryder’s, and he was her friend, her protector, and there was something dirty and wrong about doing these intimate, secret things with him in the darkened camper with the rain pounding outside.

  Things they hadn’t even done when they’d been teenagers and full of hormones and rebellion, which would have been the perfect time. Not when they were in their thirties and full of nothing but opposing ideals and a deep, ingrained desire to not lose anything that mattered to them.

  It occurred to her then that it was a bigger risk now than it would have ever been when they were young.

  But that thought was only a fleeting one, because after that he started pushing her skirt up her thighs, the damp fabric resisting, but before long she was exposed, and he was hooking his finger in the waistband of her panties and pulling them down her legs, wedging her thighs apart with his broad shoulders.

  Then he dipped his head, and it was no longer her breasts that were receiving attention from that wicked mouth—a mouth she would’ve never characterized as wicked before this—it was somewhere much more intimate.

  “I don’t like that,” she said, her voice a rushed whisper.

  It always felt like too much pressure, too much attention, and she didn’t allow more than a feeble gesture toward the act because she didn’t like being set up for failure.

  She was much more comfortable with things where the objective was her partner’s orgasm and not her own, since clearly that wasn’t the point or purpose of her getting naked with someone.

  “Then no one’s done it right,” he growled, not put off by her protest.

  She was about to protest again when his mouth made contact with her wet, aching flesh.

  His tongue left a streak of fiery need behind as he traced a path through her folds to the center of her need for him.

  And something unexpected happened. Something incredible.

  A miracle, really.

  He pressed his fingers down against her, parting her, spreading her wide as he explored her with his mouth, as he pushed her harder, farther, farther than she had ever imagined possible, not just with a partner, but to heights she hadn’t even begun to achieve on her own.

  She was panting, her breath coming in short, harsh gasps.

  It was electrifying. Terrifying.

  Because she had no control over this. She wasn’t conducting the train, not now. And not ever, not with him.

  She tried to flex her hips in time with the movement, follow the rhythm of the rain, make some sense of it, try and get ahead of it, try and bring it back under her control, but there was no doing that. Not at all.

  Because he set the pace, and he set the intensity. Because he made it amazing and dangerous and wonderful. Because he was Ryder Daniels, her very best friend in the entire world, and the only man who had ever seemed to know what to do with her body.

  Her friend, who she would have said was beautiful, but perhaps far too good to be wicked in quite this way.

  But she’d underestimated him.

  And as disturbing as everything about tonight was, that might have been the most disturbing thing of all.

  But then he brought his hands in to work together with his mouth, and she could no longer have a care about how things should be, or what she found disturbing, because there was only pleasure as he pushed one finger deep inside her, followed by another, as he continued to focus his mouth on that sensitive bundle of nerves there, as he made her feel things, deep and rich and wonderful that she hadn’t imagined she was capable of.

  And then he looked up, those familiar brown eyes meeting hers, a completely unfamiliar light in them.

  “Come for me, Sammy.” She trembled, the muscles in her thighs shaking. And then he said on a low growl, “Samantha. Come for me.”

  And she broke. Utterly dissolved beneath his touch, beneath his mouth, quivering, shaking, near to shattering as the most powerful orgasm she’d ever experienced in her life tore through her like a twister over the plains. Uprooting everything inside her. Everything she knew. Everything she was. Possibly everything she had been on the path to becoming. Rearranging the landscape of what was possible in her. Around her.

  She was raw and shaken when it was over, and then he rose up and kissed her on the mouth, the intense flavor of her pleasure evidence that couldn’t be denied.

  Her skin was damp. From rain and perspiration and desire.

  “There,” he said, his voice rough. “Now you’ve come with a partner.”

  Her body still felt like it might belong to someone else, and she was still grappling with that sensation when he began to move away from her. “I’ll let you get some rest.”

  “I...”

  But she didn’t know quite what to say. And by the time she thought she might have something to say, he was gone. Leaving her behind in her caravan with nothing but the sound of the rain on the roof to ground her to the moment.

  Her heart rate still hadn’t returned to normal.

  Because she just had an orgasm. With a man.

  Not just with a man, but with Ryder. The only man that had ever really mattered.

  The one she couldn’t make do without. And suddenly, she was very glad he had left. Very glad that he had given her reprieve.

  She peeled her wet clothes from her body and crawled beneath the covers, damp and shivering, still wearing her jewelry.

  She didn’t know what had just happened to her.

  No. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was she knew exactly what had happened to her. She just didn’t know where she was supposed to go from here.

  And the one person that she truly wanted to talk to, the one person that might be able to help her deal with the riot of emotions inside her, was the person who had caused them.

  CHAPTER TEN

  RYDER COULDN’T GET last night out of his mind. Couldn’t get the taste of Sammy off his tongue, and frankly he didn’t want to anyway. He had done a damned idiotic thing last night, and today he couldn’t be bothered to care. He hadn’t seen her all day, and by the time dinner rolled around, he was anticipating the sight of her like a blow to the face.

  Perhaps not the most eloquent of similes, but the whole thing wasn’t overly eloquent.

  It had been desperate and dirty on his part, and she had fallen apart in his arms, and when it was over, he had known that one of two things was going to happen next.

  He either had to leave immediately or he was going to strip them both naked and finish what he’d started.

  As he held her, trembling, his face still scant inches away from the most intimate part of her, he had known that she wasn’t ready for all that.

  And frankly, he wasn’t sure he was, either.

  Things had gone further than he’d meant them to, and caution had been set the hell on fire.

  He walked into the house and through the entryway, kicking boots to the side. Rose’s and Logan’s, already sitting there. “You’re meddling.” He heard his friend’s voice coming from the dining room.

  Rose and Logan were sitting at the table, each one with a beer. Rose was examining Logan with a bright kind of keenness that they all feared Rose turning on them.

  The youngest of all the kids, Rose was irrepressible. And the meddler.

  She meant well, but she tended to jump into things with both feet. Lead with her heart, followed up with her mouth, and as far as he could tell, her brain was typically somewhere well behind those other two things.

  “I’m not meddling. I’m just...prying. And saying that I think if I’m right, you should go for it.”

  “If you’re right about what?” Ryder asked.

  Logan looked up from where he was sitting and gave Ryder a world-weary expression.

  “She thinks that I have a thing for Sammy. And that I ought to ask her ou
t.”

  The back of Ryder’s neck lit on fire. “All right. Are you suggesting that he help her with her pregnancy scheme?”

  “I’m just saying that if he likes her he needs to get in there, because he’s going to have to stop her from doing that.”

  “When did I give you the impression that I liked her?” Logan asked.

  “I just thought that you might. And, the two of you would be a great couple.”

  “What do you know about couples?” Ryder asked.

  Given the conversation he’d had with Logan about Sammy only recently, he knew that Logan didn’t have any kind of interest in her. His friend thought that Ryder was in love with her.

  Difficult to think about now.

  He walked into the kitchen and jerked the fridge open, pulling out his own bottle of beer.

  “You’re very serious,” Rose said. “Sammy might lighten you up a little bit. Anyway, she’s pretty, and you both live here...”

  “I’m good, Rose, thank you,” Logan said.

  “I just thought that you might...”

  “I don’t,” Logan said, looking up from the table and meeting Ryder’s eyes again.

  Rose turned around. “I think he’s being ridiculous.”

  “Well, he clearly thinks you are being ridiculous.”

  “He usually does. I’m not really bothered by that.”

  “Well, why would you be?” Logan said. “Apparently, you only think I have good taste if it matches up with yours.”

  “Obviously,” Rose said.

  “I’m not sure that you’d make it as a matchmaker,” Logan said.

  “Why not? I think I have a pretty good sense for people.”

  “Have you ever even been on a date?” he pressed.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  All things considered, the conversation was a little bit overly ridiculous.

  “You need to be with a woman who will lighten you up a little bit,” Rose said. “Ryder needs a woman who will do things for him, so he doesn’t have to be such a ridiculous martyr all the time.”

  He stiffened. Because it was the second time in twenty-four hours that someone had called him that. And he was beginning to wonder if it was true.

  If Sammy was right.

  If he’d gone straight for the thing that he said he didn’t want because he was an eternal martyr climbing up on a wooden stake asking for life to go ahead and set them on fire.

  But then Iris walked in, followed by Sammy, whose eyes met his, and then she jerked away like she’d been scalded.

  And he knew that he wasn’t as much of a martyr as his sister or Sammy seemed to think.

  Because martyring himself would’ve been sitting back and watching her sleep with another man. Get pregnant with another man’s baby.

  Martyring himself would have been stepping back and letting her do what she wanted while he suffered.

  And now that he had tasted her he knew that for sure. That what he wanted more than anything was her, whether or not he had tricked himself all these years into believing he was standing by holding sentry while engaging in some kind of courtly love.

  There was nothing pure about what he felt.

  Nothing like love about it, either.

  Was he that basic that all this time he had never really been able to squash the lust that he felt for his best friend?

  That in the end, it was stronger than wanting her to have the kind of happiness that she was after?

  He feared that it was.

  And if he were a martyr, he would have taken a step back right then. Let himself be consumed by his desire rather than seeking to satisfy it. But he didn’t. Because everybody might think that he was like that, but he knew that he wasn’t. Not in this. Not now.

  So there. A victory, even if it was a hollow one. He would take what he can get.

  Her blue eyes met his, and there was a strange glint in them that he couldn’t read. Sammy was often enigmatic; it was part of her charm. And he knew it was somewhat intentional. He had to wonder if she was being intentional in it this evening.

  “And how was your day?” she asked.

  He felt like she was deliberately lobbing that question into the center of the room and not at him specifically. And the test was whether or not he would respond. But he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to.

  “Great,” Rose said happily, taking the pressure off him in terms of who was meant to answer first.

  “Just fine,” he responded.

  When her eyes connected with his there was a crack of electricity that hit hard and low in his stomach and then skittered outward. Downward.

  If there hadn’t been the faintest color in Sammy’s cheeks he wouldn’t have thought she was affected at all.

  “Wonderful,” she said. “I picked blackberries, so there will be a pie tonight.”

  She was all sweetness and light, sugary smiles and promises of dessert. He didn’t trust it.

  He knew that no one else thought it was weird at all, because they only ever saw this sunny side of her, so they didn’t sense the false note there. But he saw the sharp side of her often enough that he could tell when it was lurking beneath the surface. He deserved it, quite frankly. But he wanted to know what manner of storm was coming. Because he knew there was one.

  That distraction was enough to take his mind off the intimacy that had passed between them. For a moment. Not for very long.

  But hey, he was a man after all. So of course he was going to think about what it had been like last night. It had been a long time since he was with a woman. A long time since he had tasted one like that.

  And you’re going to pretend that’s all this is? You fixating because you’re a man and she’s a woman and you did dirty things with her?

  Not because it was your friend, and it was the culmination of years of suppressed fantasies.

  All right. He couldn’t pretend that. Of course it was about Sammy. Of course it would always be about who she was. It couldn’t not be.

  Sex for him was a pretty low-stakes game. He went out of town; he found women he had no obligation to. He made sure that nobody got hurt. He was safe; he was respectful. It wasn’t intense. It didn’t need to be. It was nice. A release.

  But this had not been a release, and it wasn’t just because he hadn’t come. This wasn’t a release because it had built up more uncertainty between them than it would ever let go.

  Because it had caused him to violate some of the very basic tenets of his existence, and it was difficult to bring himself to even regret it.

  Sammy took her position at the table next to him, her arm brushing against his. And she looked at him, out of the corner of her eye, and that was the only indication that he had that she even remembered what had happened between them last night. Because it was far too intentional. All of this was.

  “How did you sleep?” he asked, looking at her with intent.

  “Well,” she responded, looking a little bit surprised that he had come at her like that.

  A smile twitched at the corner of her mouth, and he had the sudden thought that she might actually just blurt it all out there at the table in front of all of his family. That she would just go ahead and say that he had given her an orgasm last night in her camper just to watch the world burn.

  But no.

  What was it she’d said to him the other night? That it hurt her, the way that he assumed that everything she did was simply down to shenanigans.

  He was guilty of that.

  As guilty as he was of the martyrdom she had accused him of.

  That was his fault. Going around assuming that he had the correct read on her, but she didn’t have one on him. But then, it wasn’t arrogant so much as it was he didn’t really think he had a lot of secrets from the world. Or himself.


  He was a simple guy. He worked on his ranch; he took care of his family. They needed less from him now, but that was basically still the focus of his life.

  He went out when he really wanted to. Found a woman when he needed to. He liked steak and he liked beer. He cared about his friends. Not that he had that many.

  And she was the most important among them.

  So it wasn’t that he didn’t think she was smart enough to see through him, so much as he didn’t think there was anything to see.

  She was making him question that slightly.

  In making him question the way that he looked at her.

  He did that with his siblings sometimes, didn’t give them enough credit for the years and what they’d done to change them. For the progression of time and how it had matured them. He wondered if he did the same to Sammy.

  And if so, then he had to backtrack and figure whatever she was doing now... It wasn’t just to mess with him. Well, it was to mess with him for sure, but she must have another aim. One that served her broader purpose.

  But it was difficult to think because she brushed against him again, and the electricity between them was the kind that made it hard to breathe or think. The kind that he’d only ever experienced with her.

  When they were young.

  He hated that. She was only two years younger than he was, but he’d felt ancient at eighteen, with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and a pretty sixteen-year-old that was at his same high school shouldn’t have seemed so out of bounds.

  All those times she’d climbed into his bed, right at first, it had been like torture. Until he’d learned how to push it down. And then he’d spent seventeen years since pushing it all down. Until last night.

  Until now.

  “Glad to hear it,” he said.

  “How is your baby thing going?” Rose asked.

  Rose had ulterior motive embedded in her tone, and he was sure he’d have recognized it even if he hadn’t already heard her talking to Logan about it.

  Iris grimaced. “You can’t ask someone how their baby...thing is going,” she said.

  “Sure I can,” Rose said. “I mean the fact that we know it’s happening means that I can ask. Anyway, Sammy would ask any one of us.”